If you’re in the market for fun hackable tool that sits between “bash script” and “real developer” I highly recommend checking out babashka.
It lets you write shell scripts with clojure. Babashka itself is a single executable, so no JVM bulk or startup time. And the built-in libs include all sorts of nifty utilities. Parsers, servers, excellent async stuff (but IMO clojure might have the best async story of any language out there so I’m biased), http stuff. All macro-able and REPL-able and everything. It’s a scripting dream, and when it’s time to be an adult, you can throw it on the JVM too!
You might also enjoy Janet https://janet-lang.org/
Wow that IS cool!! Almost sounds too good to be true lol. Green threads? Repl? Event loop? One <1MB binary? What the heck!!
a different approach is to replace bash altogether and switch to modern shells like fish, elvish, murex, nushell (not stable yet afaik) or oils (very interesting approach, it has a bash or sh compatible mode and another one with a more modern and cleaner syntax).
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